Uml Ascii Art Tips

Some tips for drawing UmlAsciiArt on Wiki pages:

Don't overdo it. Words are usually sufficient.
Try editing your pictures offline, e.g. with Emacs picture mode or artist-mode (http://www.lysator.liu.se/~tab/artist/).
Remember that if you use WordsSmashedTogetherLikeSo (e.g. as method names), Wiki will add a '?' after them as unresolved links (unless they resolve...). Draw your diagrams including the question marks, and remove them just before you save. Or use SixSingleQuotes to avoid this problem entirely.
Make abstract things italic by surrounding them with doubled single quotes (''). Do this once you've otherwise finished your diagram, as it pushes everything out of line.
When editing in Wiki, create a blank "canvas" by writing several lines of many spaces. Turn on overwrite mode to draw the diagram. Move things around by turning off overwrite mode and either deleting or inserting spaces.
Don't use horizontal tabs. Some browsers set the width of a tab to a different number of spaces to your browser/editor does.

And if you think this is hard, try coding PlanKalkuel on a TeleType.

Questions: Does EMACS picture mode give you a "semi-automatic" way to create ASCII art? (Maybe I should learn EMACS after all) I've sometimes wondered if anybody ever made a drawing program which converted the output to ASCII art? (And using things like a mouse to draw "freeform" (at least somewhat freeform).) And how about "autosizing" boxes, and "sticky" interconnect lines and arrows? (I know, I know, I'm just wondering!) -- RandyKramer (anonymous coward - artist-mode, per the link above, does).

See http://cedet.sourceforge.net/cogre.shtml for a connected graph editor for emacs, does some UML, and some UML generated from source -- ShaeErisson

CategoryWikiEditing